“I was very glad to hear of the brother you describe, for I have one too, and know what it is to have presence in two places.  Charles Chauncy Emerson is a lawyer now settled in this town, and, as I believe, no better Lord Hamlet was ever.  He is our Doctor on all questions of taste, manners, or action.  And one of the pure pleasures I promise myself in the months to come is to make you two gentlemen know each other.”

Alas for human hopes and prospects!  In less than a year from the date of that letter, on the 17th of September, 1836, he writes to Carlyle:—­

“Your last letter, dated in April, found me a mourner, as did your first.  I have lost out of this world my brother Charles, of whom I have spoken to you,—­the friend and companion of many years, the inmate of my house, a man of a beautiful genius, born to speak well, and whose conversation for these last years has treated every grave question of humanity, and has been my daily bread.  I have put so much dependence on his gifts, that we made but one man together; for I needed never to do what he could do by noble nature, much better than I. He was to have been married in this month, and at the time of his sickness and sudden death, I was adding apartments to my house for his permanent accommodation.  I wish that you could have known him.  At twenty-seven years the best life is only preparation.  He built his foundation so large that it needed the full age of man to make evident the plan and proportions of his character.  He postponed always a particular to a final and absolute success, so that his life was a silent appeal to the great and generous.  But some time I shall see you and speak of him.”

Section 3.  In the year 1836 there was published in Boston a little book of less than a hundred very small pages, entitled “Nature.”  It bore no name on its title-page, but was at once attributed to its real author, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The Emersonian adept will pardon me for burdening this beautiful Essay with a commentary which is worse than superfluous for him.  For it has proved for many,—­I will not say a pons asinorum,—­but a very narrow bridge, which it made their heads swim to attempt crossing, and yet they must cross it, or one domain of Emerson’s intellect will not be reached.

It differed in some respects from anything he had hitherto written.  It talked a strange sort of philosophy in the language of poetry.  Beginning simply enough, it took more and more the character of a rhapsody, until, as if lifted off his feet by the deepened and stronger undercurrent of his thought, the writer dropped his personality and repeated the words which “a certain poet sang” to him.

This little book met with a very unemotional reception.  Its style was peculiar,—­almost as unlike that of his Essays as that of Carlyle’s “Sartor Resartus” was unlike the style of his “Life of Schiller.”  It was vague, mystic, incomprehensible, to most of those who call themselves common-sense people.  Some of its expressions lent themselves easily to travesty and ridicule.  But the laugh could not be very loud or very long, since it took twelve years, as Mr. Higginson tells us, to sell five hundred copies.  It was a good deal like Keats’s